Freedom-Fighters Forum

by William J. Dell – March 2005

Have you ever considered a ring and how like life it is? A ring is one eternal round. It has no beginning and no end.. If you were to cut the ring, it would have a beginning and an end, but if you leave it the way it was made and intended there is no beginning and therefore no end. So it is with life. Our true selves, our spirits, are eternal without beginning or end. Life did not begin when we were born into mortality, nor will it end when we die and pass back through the veil.

So often while we are traveling along this journey we call life, we forget that we are only spiritual beings here for a temporal experience. We forget that we have a Father in Heaven who has sent us here only to be tested and to improve our understanding and abilities. We left His home for mortality much like our children leave home to go to the university to be tested and to improve their education and abilities. Eventually; however, there is a graduation day and the university experience comes to a close and our children are expected to return home, to ours or their own because of marriage. So it is with mortality, eventually it must come to a close and we are expected to return home to our Father in Heaven.

To enable us to have a good experience while He sends us to this mortal earth life for an education, our Father provided for us our bodies wherein we can move and have life as we know it while here in mortality. Many times however we become very attached to these bodies and come to believe that they, our bodies, are our real selves rather than our spirits which they house. They, our bodies, become comfortable to us much like well broken in slippers and we have a hard time wanting to part with them. Even when they become old, broken, not very serviceable and our quality of life is suffering, we want to hold on to them. We forget that if we lay aside our bodies that our life does not end it just continues in a different setting. This is so because our true selves, our spirits, are eternal, without beginning or end.

Some of our poets have caught this vision of our eternal nature which we are sometimes wont to forget. Consider just three. First Williams Wordsworth from his Ode on Intimations of Immortality:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God; who is our home:
…

The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

Then from that great philosopher, Anonymous:

When God sends forth a tiny soul
To learn the ways of earth,
A mother’s love is waiting here –
We call this wonder – birth.

When God calls home a tired soul
And stills a fleeting breath,
A Father’s love is waiting there,
This too is birth – not death.

And,

The Rose Beyond the Wall

A rose once grew where all could see,
Sheltered beside a garden wall,
And, as the days passed swiftly by,
It spread its branches, straight and tall.

One day, a beam of light shone through
A crevice that had opened wide –
The rose bent gently toward its warmth
Then passed beyond to the other side.

Now, you who deeply feel its loss,
Be comforted – the rose blooms there.
Its beauty even greater now,
Nurtured by God’s loving care.

Can you hear these resounding testimonies of the eternal nature of man? Can you too capture their vision and remember that we are only spiritual beings sent from God, our Father, to have a temporal experience for a season? Can you too come to understand that this journey we call life did not begin with our birth, nor will it end with what we call death? It cannot, because life is eternal without beginning or end. Life like the ring is one eternal round. God in His love for us so decreed it and so it is. I know these things to be true because the Holy Spirit has revealed them to my spirit, my true self, and I testify of them to you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.